3.3.5 On Referring
Throughout the story we have been examining, the Aztecs assign an NC to the expression maçatl, but when they speak among themselves about what they have seen, they refer to individual horses. I shall be talking about that very complex phenomenon, the act of referring, in 5. Here we need to detach not only the content from the reference but also the instructions for the identification of the referent from the concrete acts of referring. Someone could have received instructions for identifying an armadillo and yet never in his life referred to an armadillo (i.e., he never said This is an armadillo or There is an armadillo in the kitchen).
The CT provides instructions for identifying the referent, and this undoubtedly constitutes a form of competence. Referring to Something is, instead, a form of performance. It is certainly based on referential competence but, as we shall see in 5, not only on that. The referent of the word horse is a thing. Referring to horses is an act, not a thing.
After listening to his messengers’ accounts, Montezuma possessed an embryonic competence, but if, as was related, he withdrew for some time into a stubborn silence, then he did not immediately carry out any act of reference to horses. Even before they provided him with instructions for identifying the referent, his messengers were referring to horses when they told him they intended to talk to him about Things they dared not describe. On emerging from his silence, Montezuma could have referred to these as yet unknown Things, for example by asking what and how they were, even before he possessed instructions for their identification. In this way he would have demonstrated that one can understand reference to entities, and one can refer to them, without possessing a CT or even an NC. Montezuma understood that the messengers were carrying out an act of reference, and nevertheless he was unable to understand what the referent of that act was.
3.4. Semiosic Primitives
3.4.1 Semiosic Primitives and Interpretation
Let us think of a being placed in an elementary environment, before it comes into contact with others of its kind. However it decides to name them, this being will have to acquire some fundamental «notions» (no matter how it might later decide to organize them into systems of categories, or in any case into units of content). It will have to have a notion of high and low (essential for its corporeal equilibrium); of standing upright or lying down; of some physiological operations, such as swallowing or excreting; of walking, sleeping, seeing, hearing; of perceiving thermic, olfactory, or gustatory sensations; of feeling pain or relief; of clapping hands, thrusting a finger into some soft material, hitting, gathering, rubbing, scratching, and so on. As soon as it comes into contact with other beings, or with the surrounding environment in general, it will have to have notions regarding the presence of something that opposes its body: coitus, struggle, the possession or the loss of an object of desire, probably the cessation of life … However it comes to name these fundamental experiences, they are certainly original.
This means to say that the moment in which we «enter language,» there is a disposition toward meaning of a prelinguistic character; in other words, there are «certain classes of meanings about which human beings are in innate agreement.»18 The attribution of animality to a certain object would be an example of this type. It may be that such an attribution will later emerge as erroneous, as would happen in the case of an archaic mentality that saw the clouds as animals, but it is certain that one of the first ways in which we react to what comes toward us in the environment is an attribution of animality or vitality to an object standing before us, and this has nothing to do with «categories» such as Animal: the animality I am talking about is certainly precategorial.
I shall say in 3.4.2 why I consider this use of the terms category, categorial, and precategorial to be improper. In any case, notions such as Animal, Mineral, and Artifact (which in many compositional semantics are considered as semantic primitives, probably innate, not open to further analysis, and occasionally constituted in hierarchic finite systems of hyponyms and hyperonyms) can make sense as elements of an MC. The possibility of their being primitive, impervious to analysis, and organized into hierarchies and the question of to what extent a finite inventory of them can be conceived have been discussed in Eco (1984, 2). They certainly depend not on perceptual experience but on a segmentation and organization of the continuum of the content that presupposes a coordinated system of assumptions. The semiosic primitives I am talking about are not like this, as they depend on the preclassificatory perception of something as either living and animated or devoid of life.
When we feel on the arm or the hand the presence of a foreign body, no matter how small, occasionally without even looking (and sometimes the interval between perceptual hypothesis and motor response is infinitesimal), either we use the other hand to squash something, or we prime the index finger with the thumb to flick something away. Usually we squash when we have assumed (even before having decided, because our safety depends on the speed of our reflexes) that the presence is a mosquito or some other bothersome insect, and we flick the body away when we assume it is vegetable or mineral waste. If it is decided that we must «kill,» it is because a feature of animality in the foreign body has been noticed. It is a primary recognition, preconceptual (in any case prescientific), having to do with perception and not with categorial knowledge (if anything, it orients categorial knowledge, it offers itself as a basis for interpretation at higher cognitive levels).
3.4.2 On Categories
Cognitive psychology often talks of our capacity for thought as being founded on the possibility of categorial organization. The idea is that the world of which we have experience is made up of such a number of objects and events, that if we were to identify and name them all individually, we would be overwhelmed by the complexity of the environment. And so the only way to avoid becoming a prisoner of the particular lies in our capacity to «categorize,» that is, to make different things equivalent, grouping objects and events into classes (e.g., Bruner et al. 1956).
In itself the idea is incontrovertible. But, and this is not to say that the ancients had already thought of everything, if we substitute «categorization» with the term «conceptualization,» it will be noticed that yet again we are talking about the problem of how language (and with it our cognitive apparatus) leads us to talk and think in generalia—in other words, that we unite individuals in sets.
Grouping manifold tokens under a single type is the way in which language (affected, as they used to say in the Middle Ages, by penuria nominum) works. But it is one thing to say that, faced with various individuals, we manage to think of them all as «cat» and another to say that we manage to think of all cats as animals (or felines). These are two different problems. Knowing that a cat is a feline seems to belong more to the competence registered as MC than to that registered as NC, while the quasi immediate perception of cat struck us as a precategorial phenomenon.
The fact is that in contemporary literature on this subject, the term «category» is used in a way very different from the one in which it was used by both Aristotle and Kant, even though we often see authors who, when they tackle the problem, refer back—without specific quotations but and in an almost rhetorical attempt to legitimize their assumptions—to the classical heritage.
Aristotle thought there were ten categories, the Substance and the nine predicates that could be predicated of them, i.e., that something was in a certain time, in a certain place, that it had certain qualities, that it feared something or did something else, et cetera. What a certain subject was (a man, a dog, a tree) was not a problem for Aristotle. One perceived a substance and understood what its essence was (in other words, Aristotle thought that as soon as we see the token of a man, we assign it to the type «man»). In the Aristotelian sense, applying the categories does not go much further than saying that a cat is being perceived, that it is white, that it is running through the Lyceum, etc.). From the standpoint of contemporary cognitive psychology, all this would belong to the precategorial, or it would barely bring into play those things that are called «basic categories,» such as «cat,» and bring into play also a rather vaguely defined activity that would consist in recognizing that a given object has active or passive properties.
For Kant, categories were something far more abstract than the Aristotelian categories (unity, plurality, reality, negation, substance and accident, causality, etc.), and we saw in 2.3 how difficult it was for him to say what they have to do with empirical concepts such as dog, chair, swallow, or sparrow.
But let us
